When online and offline merge
January 28, 2009
The schizophrenic nature of our identities is resolving itself. You are no longer one thing in the chatroom, on Myspace or the blogosphere and another in the board room, bedroom or classroom. After years of painful fragmentation, your identity decided to rebel and it got a bit of help from the Internet.
It’s true. The old hay-days of the Internet are long gone. Remember when we used to troll discussion boards and even erotic interactions all under the guise of an assumed identity? Don’t lie. You did it, too. How many user IDs have you seen along the lines of SquishyChic125, GoodwithTools05, or HorseHung69. Perhaps you weren’t trying to be so dark and mysterious, but you were simply taking on a different identity. My first screenname from AOL was BabyBodeen. Despite the silliness of our online labels, they served us well. Through the anonymity of these environments (admit it, it was pretty easy to falsify information on that Yahoo! sign-up form), we could create new identities without the accountability of anyone recognizing us. We used the Internet to role-play. An introverted person offline could act extroverted online. A man could act as a woman and vice versa. The shy nerd could be the tough bully. No one could call us out. It was fantastic if you wanted to escape the constraints of your offline identity.
But when everyone escapes to the same place, no one can escape at all. Writing a paper regarding the role of Facebook on identity formation, I discovered the Internet is no longer an avenue for us to explore an identity we might not otherwise assume. Now, chances are your mom is on Facebook. If not, she’s probably got three or four requests to join in her inbox. Just about everyone else you know is on Facebook, too. With the purpose of social networking sites to strengthen your social network, anonymity is not only archaic – it’s down right impossible and impractical. If you didn’t create a profile that reflected who you are offline, no one would find you online.
Sure, you could still make up an identity. Sure, you could tell all of your friends that you’re alias is ‘John McLovin’ and have them friend you that way, but you don’t. It’s just too much trouble nowadays. Everyone is online and they expect you – the offline you – to be online, too.
And this is where your identity fights back and finds all its little pieces. When your brother, boss and client all follow you on Twitter and are your friend on Facebook and LinkedIn, you can’t be Jeff the Jock AND Jeff the Nerd anymore. If you describe yourself as an avid reader of Pablo Neruda and your best friend knows you actually mean ‘Maxim’, you could get called out. Knowing you could, but not necessarily ever getting called out, is often enough to keep you from embellishing too much. Your identity is reunifying itself whether you like it or not.
And that’s OK. It means the Internet is being accepted into our culture as seamlessly as the telephone and phonebook (remember that doorstop dropped off annually). The Internet is no longer a foreign country but it’s a genuine communication tool. As our identity progresses and pushes us in the direction of being ourselves wherever we are, we will find better ways to leverage the Internet into our every day lives in a way that works for us – whoever we are.
If you’d like to read the full report I wrote, you can download it here: A Review of Identity on Facebook
